7 comments:

IF anything on my site can help you out, feel free to use it - www.theescapist.com One of the FAQ pages in particular mentions the examinations on D&D and murder/suicide that have found no connection (http://www.theescapist.com/basic_gaming_faq.htm#reputation)

(I blogged about this article and your videos yesterday, by the way. Thanks!)

If I were replying to that article, I would tread carefully. We are talking about the unimaginable grief of the parents, family and friends of those children.

Having said that, it seems in many of those instances, the perpetrators were mentally unstable before-hand. The tragedy, (apart from the obvious one, which should never be down-played) is that those perpetrators were never identified as having mental illnesses.

It seems like the YOA provisions on this case make it difficult to discuss the actual mental state of the perpetrator here, so going with a more general discussion of the fact that Dr. Radecki's "expert" testimony is unconfirmed in the wider scientific community. Perhaps a warning that "correlation is not causation" would be in order as well.

Explain a few points of basic logic, in 1985 the game was popular amongst most kids, ergo it is likely that most kid criminals played D&D, this is no different than how most kid criminals wore blue jeans, not because blue jeans had anything to do with their behaviour, merely because most people wear them.

Point out good examples of famous gamers who break the stereotype, I would suggest Stephen Colbert and or Vin Diesel.

tie in the phenomenom to the hype about rock music causing a moral panic of its own when it was introduced.

About Me

Greg is a boastful, hammer-wielding, red-bearded dwarf who started playing D&D in the early 1980s when hooked by the Red Box. When he's not obsessed with D&D he poses as a sleep-deprived professor of popular culture.